Team Albert

Got home late last night. A brief visit as I'll return to work tomorrow.

I'm sitting here in a McDonald's in Chico, sipping a vanilla shake, trying to kill time. I'm waiting for Kylie and her friend (who are dressed up in full EMO attire) while they enjoy a flick.

They, being twelve and all, weren't all that keen on me attending a Twilight Movie Number Five Thousand (or whatever it is) with them. Not that I was too keen on seeing this movie; having watched one Twilight film in the past, well, that's enough of Team Jacob or Team Albert or Team Phil to last me a lifetime.

I don't really understand what all the commotion is about teenage vampires and werewolves. Nor do I understand quite what the fascination with Bellah is. Such a wooden, humorless, drab character. And all this obsession and drama! These emotions are best left to young people; they have the energy for all that rot.

No, I don't have any desire to see another werewolf movie. An American Werewolf in London was the best werewolf movie ever made. Cheesy, funny, hokey. And also about backpacking!

Work Extra...

I got asked to stay an extra day in the Napa Valley. And so I crashed in the Monastic Dorm last night---fell asleep quickly and even slept through the constant stream of health professionals who do their very best every morning to make sure that I don't get the needed rest. Foiled them again! This time.

And so a nice leisurely walk on this hillside. The photo above is the view from the helicopter port. Beauty!

I stopped by the pharmacy and bought the supplements that Andrew Weil states are so essential: Fish Oil, B complex and some Red Rice Yeast.

Weil

"In order for man to succeed in life, god provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, men can attain perfection." Plato

I read this in Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Happiness last night. And this prompts me to get out of bed after a night of very interrupted sleep and go for a walk.

People state they don't get much sleep in a hospital; the same is true for this hotel for hospital guests. My room is across the hall from the elevator---and all sorts of hospital professionals use the elevator as a short cut from the upper parking lots down to the hospital. Since the elevator was built a long, long time ago---it is clanky and loud. The cacophony starts about 6 am, and is a constant parade of health professionals from then until after 9am. Of course, all the employees and family members staying in the hotel are also stirring in those hours. The result is interrupted sleep.

I'm about half way through this new book of Weil's. I like him. I had the chance to hear him talk a few years ago when I lived in Colorado.

There does seem to be a cult of personality around him though. Anybody who has to have a picture of himself on every single book he writes must have an ego the size of New Jersey. And being a typical MD, there isn't a reference to any mental health professional who is an RN. He gathers information from other MD's, psychologists, pharmacists, LCSW's, run of the mill therapists---but nurses are no where to be seen.

We shall give the book a better look later.

Mustard...

Drove down to the Napa Valley last night. This morning I did something I haven't done in quite sometime: I got up out of bed and went for a walk.

I went to one of my regular haunts. The Mustard, for which the Napa Valley is famous, is already in full bloom. Caistoga, a town that I lived in for five years, has its "Mustard Festival" in March; that used to be when the height of the Mustard season was. This hardy little plant just keeps blooming earlier and earlier.

Some call it "climate change".

Christmas Water

Christmas Day and it is nice enough to hang out clothes to dry.

After the obligatory Oyster Stew and Dungeness Crab last night, we awoke to the usual activities: starting the fire, making the coffee, feeding the dogs and bunnies and chickens. And then presents!

The girls made a haul: snowboards and parkas and snowpants and boots and knick knacks and more clothes and a Monopoly game and all  the other implements of a consumerist Christmas. Openings done. Off we go for a Christmas Walk.

This winter has been dry thus far. The Sierra have had no snow. Daytime temperatures have been in the sixties. In California, people start getting nervous when the rains don't arrive on time. Feeding and watering nearly 38 million people requires a whole lot of water. Agriculture is the number one use of water. As such, every river except one has a whole series of water storage dams which have enabled the human population to get so large. The salmon are the ones who have paid the price of all this over-development. Since the creation of all the dams beginning in the 30's, the once abundant, unique four-times-a-year salmon runs can now be numbered in the low thousands. Once they were millions. Human population growth always has a cost.

North of here, the Klamath River might just get the distinction of becoming the first free flowing river reclaimed from the dams. Of course, this will cost several million dollars and most of the residents of North Eastern California are opposed to it. I think the salmon should be allowed at least one more free flowing river. Idealistically, at least half the rivers of California should be free flowing to the sea. That's only fair.

The future? There are opportunities to remove some dams on some of the tributaries of the Sacramento River. Mostly this remains an environmentalist's dream---but maybe someday, somehow, the people will place the salmon's needs equal to other creature's. Probably this is a pipe dream; the farmer's are opposed to losing any water storage.

But one thing that could really help the salmon population is to decrease the water flow to Southern California during drought years. Getting those pumps to stop pummeling salmon fry into paste is a huge political problem though. The regulatory agencies are always besmirched by those who need the water for crops and swimming pools. And the salmon always lose.

Our water comes from a well that provides (thus far) clear, cold and tasty water.

Thoughts while walking.

Christmas Eve Walk with Frank Capra

Off for an early morning ramble on Christmas Eve. I pretty much finished Bill Bryson's "At Home" last night. Bryson is a good read. In this book he pretty much gives modern history as seen through the architecture of his home in England. It is hard not to read this book and not be impressed with how much we've learned over the last couple hundred years. Bryson turns the book into almost a stream of consciousness. It is fun just to sit back and watch him end up where he ends up. The section on all the critters that inhabit our homes is best not read in bed---for reasons that are obvious if you read the book.

We will be home for Christmas Eve. It's a Wonderful Life is on network television tonight (due to budget cuts in our home, we canceled our super duper cable subscription). We now have pretty much the same selection of channels that I had growing up. We will watch Frank Capra's classic. We will have Oyster Stew (and, as usual, I will be the only one to eat it).

Back in 1981, I  had the honor of meeting Frank Capra. He came to a class I was taking at the time. I was too young and stupid to fully appreciate whose hand I was shaking when I met him. I'd seen a couple of Capra's movies---but hadn't seen "Wonderful Life" yet. I do remember it was January of 1981. Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated. Reagan's values and Capra's values were so juxtaposed. Reagan's values of greed; Capra's everyday populism and decency. Vive Capra!

With the Occupy protests, Capra's movie seems even more poignant today as it was in 1948.

Christmas At Home...

I'll be home for Christmas...

Good to be home. I took a walk with the dogs today on our usual route. Angel is getting older now and minds much better. Abbey has turned out to be one of those dogs that just can't stand the thought of having you out of sight (or even more than a few steps away) for more than a minute or two. So Abbey always stays close by. The only exception is when Abbey flushes out a covey of quail. She is quite proud of herself when she bounds off to flush them out. Always at the same point of the walk. She runs back to me with the doggy version of an ear to ear smile.

Goals. Joni has given me permission to spend a month on the Pacific Crest Trail next summer. And so we begin to train for that. We shall get serious about this after Christmas...

We Start Again...

I'm back.  And I'm ready to start again.

I've missed this little blog. It helps me. It reminds me to get outside everyday. It helps me get off my backside and onto the trail. It helps me process what I'm reading. It enhances my life.

And so I've decided to start this little thing back up again. What's changed in the last five months? Well, I found a doctor. This doctor wants me to do all those things that Fifty Year Old Males need to do: get the usual blood work done (A1C, Lipid Profile); have a physical (I've never had one); and get that probe thing that sticks up that part of you that you'd rather not talk about.

What else has changed? Our house is much more livable. The girls are older. The dogs are still with us. We have five chickens left of the original twelve. Our water pump is leaking. We got our propane tank filled. Pretty mundane stuff.

And all that mundane stuff will be right here. In full view. Because I'm back. Maybe not daily; but close to it.

Off we go! Angel, Abbey and I had a nice little walk in the woods.

Thoreau and Cell Phones...

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” So wrote the rebellious wunderkind, Henri David Thoreau while he occupied his elder mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property; building his much vaunted cabin there back in the 1840’s.

Or to paraphrase Thoreau—we are only as rich as the things we can live without.

Perhaps you remember reading Thoreau’s Walden back in college-- before acquiring that mortgage, car, second car, second mortgage and that LED television that takes up a wall of your two-thousand square foot house that sucks enough energy to power a small village in Latin America? Thoreau lived at the dawn of the industrial age; some 150 years before the Information age. I’ve often wondered what would good Henri David have to say about this Information age---specifically cell phones?  What would he think about 3G, 4G, texting, sexting, internet capable, photo and video publishing-to-Facebook, cell phones? Would Henri own one in order to inform Ralph Waldo that he’d be over for dinner after he was done hoeing his beans and writing that last chapter on Economy?

For myself, I don’t own one (a cell phone). Don’t need one. Don’t want one. I don’t need that extra bill.  Nor do I want the capability to spend ten minutes looking at a tiny screen, eyes straining, non-agile fingers inevitably fumbling the wrong miniscule button while trying to type out some meaningless text message about the status of my desires.  Am I old fashioned to think that a text message should have some text to it? More than 140 characters? Vowels intact?

I don’t use text speak; I see it as a fart upon the English language. I prefer my sentences to be mostly complete.  And I don’t mind if I get a message from someone that actually uses a noun, verb, direct object and some of the other finer implements of language. Hell, I even like complete words. Dnt U?

We get along just fine without the little Star Trekian communication devices. (Beam me up, Scotty!) But then again, we aren’t your normal family. We live “off the grid” dependent upon a generator and a few solar panels for electricity. We recently went three years without a hot water system, and probably would still be using a water bag lying in the sun for showers to this day, if it wasn’t for the complaints of some soon-to-be teen-aged girls who inhabit our home. One winter we had to haul water thirty yards from the well to the house when the water line froze.  It took us two years to get the money together to get a proper wood stove (our only source of heat). Not that we don’t have our luxuries: we had satellite TV and Internet years before we got our shower to work. Priorities.

Which brings me back to Henri Thoreau.  “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”—he wrote.  Thoreau claimed he could live on six weeks of income for an entire year.  Easy to do when you squat on your friend’s property and show up for dinner at Mom’s every day. Yet, he was right about the simplify statement. And he was correct to say that we are as rich as we are capable of living without things and implements of luxuriant modernity.

The current recession/depression has forced many of us to simplify. Tighten our belts and do without. Poverty sucks when it isn’t voluntary. I wonder how bad things need to get before we part with our cell phones? Have they become one of Mazlow’s needs yet? Are Cell phones as important as food, water, shelter, sex? Have they become such a necessity that we will do anything--live on beans, hawk the wedding ring, sell plasma, give up a meal a day---in order to have one? I wonder…

Mount Harkness

From a hike up to where most of Desert Solitaire was published. After my absence from blogger, I'm having a difficult time getting something to post. This is a test.